Which country is recognized or documented as having the first prominent civilization? After reading so many articles, I couldn't determine which country should be acknowledged as having the oldest civilization. According to Puranas of India, it seems to be the oldest country with a prominent civilization. However, while searching Google, I found that Egyptians existed at the same time as the earliest Indian civilization. Can anybody clarify this?

3 Answers
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The Sumerians are widely credited with being the first real civilisation on Earth, beginning in around the 5th millennium BC. Cities and agricultural communities existed before this time, but are generally not considered to have constituted a civilisation. The Sumerians, who were situated in modern-day lower Iraq and Kuwait, are widely believed to have invented the wheel, writing, government, law, systematic agriculture, and irrigation, among various other early innovations and marks of civilisation.

Although the dates of the start of these civilisations are generally not well-defined, the order of the appearance of "civilisations" is often accepted as the following:

Ancient Sumerians

Ancient Egyptians

Akkadians -- arguable since they largely took over everything from the Sumerians in the same region

Ancient Indians / Indus Valley Civilisation

Ancient Chinese

Ancient Greeks (Minoans and then Myceneans) -- arguably older than the above

@Anixx: Too little is known about that culture, I believe. It would be too much of a stretch to call it a genuine civilisation, in any cases, at present. Most likely what "civilised" aspects it did pick up were from the contact of Indo-European peoples with the advanced Middle-Eastern cultures at the time.
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NoldorinDec 17 '12 at 21:18

The title asks what country traces its roots back to the oldest civilization. You mentioned Sumeria was in the Iraq area, but what about technological, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural heritage? Would you say that going that far back means just about everyone has roots in their civilization? Or is there some country or countries with a unique claim to Sumerian descent?
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Mr. BultitudeJul 26 '14 at 0:13

@Mr.Bultitude: In brief summary of a very complex issue: technological heritage was immediately the Assyrians (who later conquered the region), the entire Middle East, the Mediterranean and Indian civilisations, then the whole world in time. Ethnic? Very hard to tell, although there's nothing to suggest the Sumerians were wiped out. They lost their identity over time thanks to the Assyrians & Babylonians, but I'm sure many modern Iraqis, Syrians, Jordanians, and people far wider afield have a little Sumerian ancestry if you go back far enough!
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NoldorinJul 26 '14 at 0:38

As for linguistic descent, there are no living descendent of Sumerian, although a number of loanwords entered Assyrian and other Semitic languages, and have been passed down into modern languages. See e.g. "cane" in England (etymonline.com/index.php?search=cane). I'm sure Syriac (which still exists as a liturgical language) has a number of Sumerian loanwords, though I can't list them off the top of my head.
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NoldorinJul 26 '14 at 0:41

If you use the term civilization with the connotations of culture than the first pieces of art were found in South Africa from more than 60,000 years ago. In an even broader sense apes are now known to possess culture, by teaching technological tricks to their siblings and newcomers in their group.

After contenders like Sumerians, Egyptians, there is another forbidden world which was ruined because of earthquake or may be foreign invasion (some estimate this). Here i am talking about Indus Valley Civilisation who trace back its root since 3300 - 1300 B.C and was the most advanced among all the ancient settlements at that time.